Troll Mountain - Matthew Reilly

Matthew Reilly is best known as an author of big, action-packed thrillers, but in TROLL MOUNTAIN he ventures into YA heroic fantasy fiction with interesting results. Raf, the plucky young protagonist of this stand-alone novel, is a member of a tribe of humans that exists in a state of constant fear of the savage, brutal trolls who live on Troll Mountain just to the north of their valley. As if that wasn't bad enough, a mysterious illness strikes Raf's tribe, killing everyone who falls prey to it. The trolls have a cure for the disease, but they demand a high price for it: a lifetime of slavery. When Raf's young sister becomes ill, he decides on a daring plan of action. He's going to Troll Mountain to steal the cure.

This sets up a traditional fantasy novel quest, and Reilly handles it in a traditional manner for the most part. Raf meets an enigmatic older man who becomes a mentor to him, winds up with some other allies, has assorted adventures, and finally penetrates to the depths of Troll Mountain where he'll risk his life trying to get his hands on the cure for his sister's illness.

That disease and its cure are where Reilly throws in some interesting, unexpected angles, and that helps bring the novel to a satisfying conclusion. There's plenty of action along the way, which you'd expect from one of Reilly's novels. I've read only one other book by him, HELL ISLAND, which I thought was okay but maybe a little too action-packed (and regular readers of this blog can imagine how difficult it must be to provoke that reaction from me). TROLL MOUNTAIN is a little more leisurely, but in a good way. Overall I thought it was an entertaining book, and fans of YA heroic fantasy ought to enjoy it. 

Hell Island - Matthew Reilly

I’ve seen Australian thriller writer Matthew Reilly’s novels around for a number of years now and even used to own a few of them I never got around to reading. However, I recently came across HELL ISLAND, a slim little volume that was written originally for the Australian government to give away in an effort to promote reading, as Reilly explains in his introduction. At 30,000 words or so, it seemed worth taking the chance, especially since it features one of Reilly’s series heroes, Marine Captain Shane Schofield.


The plot is fairly simple: the U.S. aircraft carrier Nimitz has stopped at a remote Pacific research station known as Hell Island, and something has gone terribly wrong. Four teams of high-level operatives – Delta Force, Navy SEALS, 82nd Airborne, and Force Recon Marines (the latter commanded by Schofield) – are parachuted in to find out what happened and set it right. Chaos ensues.


Or to boil it down even more, to only four words: Apes with machine guns.


If that doesn’t get your blood to pumping, well, then . . . you’re not a 12-year-old boy at heart, I suppose. I am, at least some of the time, and so I really wanted to like this book. It has plenty of action, some of the characters are interesting, and it reads fast. However, Reilly’s frantic, hyper-kinetic writing style, with its abundance of italics and exclamation points, didn’t really work that well for me. I found just enough intriguing in HELL ISLAND that I might read something else by Reilly. It may take a while for me to get around to it, though. If you’re already a fan of his work I’m sure you’ll want to read this one, too, or if you’d just like to sample it, this is a good way to do that.